Things to know

Take Care of Things

There are two things to take care of: plants and chickens.

Plants

There are two sets of plants: an upper garden around our house and a lower garden around the chicken's house. I water both gardens with a bucket rather than a hose because I think it is more efficient to measure the water with the bucket - and I do not enjoy pulling the hose around.

Upper Garden

I water this garden with a plastic pitcher on the table near the front and scoop the water from the trash can by the hose bib.

Most new plants have an orange tag as below. Find the tag and then you have found the plant.

This tomato is easy to find!

These two pepper plants are not easy to find because they are not grouped with the rest.

Under the two citrus trees are squash plants - and in the middle is some oregano. Also in the bed to the left are three basil plants and some thyme.

Don't forget the patches of dichondra. They need water also.

Lower Garden

Here are the buckets and the plastic container of water. You can fill up the garbage cans while you water. There are lots of obvious plants to water down there. Here are the one's that are not obvious:

The sunflowers - I just planted them a couple of weeks ago

They are in a row and some of them are still coming up.

The sunflower seedlings look like this

Here is another one.

Chickens

You will not want to go into the chicken coop when the rooster is around because he will attack you. You can get them to go out of the coop by bribery. I have been picking the suckers ( lower vines) off the grape vines and tossing them to the chickens exercise yard - then they go out and eat the vines.

You can get them here by snapping them off the lower areas...

or above the house...

Use the rope to the right of the chicken's main door to open and close the door to the outside.

Open

Closed

Open it and then toss the treat to their area. They will flock to it.

Just pull back the top netting and toss it in...

Next, collect the eggs. They lay a dozen a day - and if you leave them for days, they will trample them so they will become icky and smell of broken eggs... so it's good to get them soon in the morning to avoid having them messed up. They usually lay them in the same place, but sometimes there will be an egg elsewhere in the house so I look in likely places to make sure I get them all.

Here is where the feed goes. It will hold 100# of crumbles and last a month.

This one is for oyster shells. It needs to be filled but I have to buy more.

I clean the water dish also when it gets dirty.

I use the toilet brush hanging in the corner to clean the water dish and a bucket of water to flush it all out.

Sometimes I clean the roosting area. This is done by raising up the roosting rack and hooking it with the hook that hangs from a rope. This opens the area to be cleaned. The straw is currently in the horse trailer - but I will clean out the coop when I come back from vacation.

Here is what it looks like hanging from the rope. You can rake it out with the little hoe or a pitch fork head outside. I use the hoe to rake it into a trash can to carry to the garden above - or the pitch fork to shovel out to the garden outside.

Here is the short handled hoe.

Here is the pitch fork.

Last thing to do is put eggs into a plastic carton. I never clean the eggs until I use them.

If you do not need eggs, you can put them in "the magic box". Put them in the box and they disappear... and money shows up. The egg fairy comes and gets them:

The Egg Fairy Box

Before

After

Unfortunately, you sometimes have to wait for days for the egg fairy to come... but it's usually worth the wait.